


Witchwork

by maplemood



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Extra Treat, Female Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Abortion, Missing Scene, Period Typical Attitudes, Witchcraft, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-07
Updated: 2018-11-07
Packaged: 2019-08-02 20:55:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16312547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: “Soft.” The old woman spits it out like a bitter taste. “That soft skin and those soft hands, girl, they’ll not serve you here.”





	Witchwork

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wholeyolk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wholeyolk/gifts).



> After finally sitting down to watch _Penny Dreadful_ last month, I thought I'd never find anybody else whose favorite character was Joan Clayton, and who loved her intense, complicated relationship with Vanessa as much as I did. So I was beyond delighted to see that you'd requested her for this exchange, and I hope you enjoy this extra treat. :)

**I.**

There are days when the wind screams over the moor like a knife over a whetting stone. Days when it flays Vanessa’s skin as thin as the hides webbed across the old woman’s totems, when she feels as though she is nothing but gristle and bone and all the hollow, rattling gaps between.

“Soft.” The old woman spits it out like a bitter taste. “That soft skin and those soft hands, girl, they’ll not serve you here.”

And yet. She is not unkind, the old woman, the witch, the Cut-Wife—at least never so unkind as she might be. She handles Vanessa with the roughness shown every girl who, beyond hope of redemption, stumbles to her cottage seeking only help.

_What will I do with you girls?_

Snagging hooks, scalding water; whimpers and screams in the night.

_What will I do with you girls?_

 

**II.**

“Once in a blue moon,” says the Cut-Wife, “there’s one as comes with a babe on the hip instead of in the belly.” She pries the squalling thing out of its mother’s arms and all but stuffs it into Vanessa’s. “Go and fetch me the green glazed jar. On the shelf by the betony, yeah?”

The jar weighs little more than the baby. Vanessa sets one on the table and joggles the other in the crook of her arm. “What else?”

“Keep it quiet.”

She’s never held a baby before. Rocking it doesn’t do much. Pacing helps a little. The swept-clean floorboards creak under Vanessa’s feet; she bounces up, then down again, humming the first song that jumps to mind. A ballad, short and sharp and cold; she does her best to warm the words.

“Twice every day.” The Cut-Wife’s voice jabs out, as deft and blunt as her fingers. “Morning and night.”

The baby snivels.

“Hush,” Vanessa whispers. “Hush.”

“Let it sink in before you put him to your teat.”

She imagines—imagines?—she feels its ribs through the wrappings, thin as twigs. Her tune falters, then settles into a low croon. “When the autumn leaves that fall from trees are green and spring up again…”

“Here now.” The Cut-Wife slides her arms under Vanessa’s, and the baby cries as she takes it. It cries when it’s given back to its mother, cries when she nestles it under her shawl, cries on the threshold, barely out of the spitting rain.

“Your salve,” the girl stutters. She really is a girl, sixteen at most. “It’ll help him?”

As always, the Cut-Wife looks an instant away from shutting the door in her face. “It’ll help with the cracks and the dryness, make the feeding easier. It won’t put coin in your husband’s pocket, or food in your belly. I’m no miracle-worker.”

Vanessa’s nails slice into her palms. The baby wails.

“Now get you gone,” the Cut-Wife says. And she shuts the door.

 

**III.**

“Skulking won’t help. What you think you can hide from me, girl?” The old woman’s eyes spark off Vanessa like flint. “I can feel your thoughts. The shape of them, eh? Nesting in all that hair. Careless,” she adds, the word razored, meant to cut. “Look at me.”

Steam from the stewpot flushes Vanessa’s face.

“Look at me, I said.”

She lifts her head.

The Cut-Wife’s face is immobile. “You thought me too hard,” she says. Potato peelings spiral from her knife.

Vanessa takes the plate of already diced potatoes, scrapes it into the pot. Steam breathes over her face and neck and arms again; at the same time a gust of wind, still sizzling with rain, rattles the windows. She thinks of the girl and her baby, no doubt drenched on their way home, and turns, strides back to the table. She bangs the plate down. “Why did you tell her that? There was no need.”

If the Cut-Wife also feels the red-hot tinge to her thoughts, she gives no sign. “That lullaby you sang. Tell me who sang it to you.”

As ever, answering is the only option. Vanessa grips the corners of the table. “My mother,” she snaps. “My nurse, perhaps—I don’t remember.”

The Cut-Wife coughs, then turns aside to spit a wad of phlegm onto the floorboards. “Always is a nurse with the likes of you,” she says, wiping her mouth. “Coddled soft. Raised up alone.”

“Your point?” Vanessa’s fingers clench bone-white. “Besides mocking me, I mean.”

For a moment she could swear the edge of a smile, vinegary-sharp, slices the other woman’s face. But Vanessa has never seen the Cut-Wife smile. “Time of old,” she says as she carves into another potato, “I sang the same song to my sister. Her that you’ve seen before. The Nightcomer. The one that lies with beasts.”

 _Glimpses only,_ Vanessa thinks, and still can’t suppress a shudder. Wraith-cloaked, waiting not an inch from the boundary stones. Pillars of black in the black night.

“Time of old,” the Cut-Wife repeats, “we lay together on the moor, I and she. On our backs, faces to the sky, legs spread in the heather. Open, wild, reckless. And she mounted her youth, rode it long and hard, thought she could keep it between her pretty thighs forever. When folk are like them leaves, girl. Meant to wither, to fall, to die.” The potato peeled, she quarters it, eyes never leaving Vanessa’s face. “We do not spring up again.”

“But.” She finds her voice has sunk to a whisper. “She was just a girl. Her baby—”

“They come to me when the spirit’s sapped out of them, trembling all the way. You think after all this, I’d feed them lies?”

“You could start with feeding them!” Vanessa bursts out. She scoops up the potato pieces before they’ve been properly diced, heedless of the Cut-Wife’s knife. “That girl was starving, her baby was starving—we have food! We can help them.”

A snort. “Didn’t run after them with a brace of rabbits and that stewpot, did you?”

Her eyes sting.

“No,” says the Cut-Wife. “You know better.”

Inches from the boiling water, her fingertips prickle cold as the rain dashing the windows. No. Vanessa isn’t so foolish as that. The rabbits would be pitched to the ground, the stewpot dashed in her face. If the girl dared touch them at all.

Outside, the night howls. The cottage shudders to its ramshackle foundations, and the fire spits like a cat.

“Why?” she demands. Furious and plaintive, like a child. “Why?” As if she doesn’t already know. The world is cold and dark, barren yet full of wickedness. Coaxing voices, whispers in the night—the world is full of demons, demons who will spread your legs, fuck you to the hilt, and leave you, mind and soul splayed wide, neither human nor beast. The world has ruined them all.

Yet light follows darkness, sooner or later. It must. It must.

“They cannot all think you a monster,” Vanessa says.

“No, girl. They think me a witch.”

She sighs, a familiar spark of irritation flaring in her belly. “You know what I mean.”

“Hmm. Do I then.” The Cut-Wife lays down her knife and stumps to the counter. She scoops a fistful of salt out of the crock. “There’s them that would suffer me to live, the same who suffer my fingers on their dugs, between their legs. They’ll not suffer a seat at my table. You know this. Keep it always at the forefront of your mind.”

“Too much salt.” Vanessa grips her wrist before the Cut-Wife can unload it all into the pot. “Whatever I thought of you,” she says, not exactly snapping, but close, “I’d rather eat at your table than starve.”

“You are you. They are they. Plenty of girls yet who haven’t let the devil taste their cunts.”

She snatches her fingers away. “You filthy woman,” Vanessa spits, the skin along her palms, where she pressed against the Cut-Wife, stinging like a swarm of bees. She’d scratch it all off if she could, scratch the Cut-Wife’s eyes out—who is she to constantly remind her, as though Vanessa could forget? As though she has the right to, this woman who tears babies from their mothers’ wombs piece by piece.

They glare at each other in the flickering light. Monsters both. The Cut-Wife’s eyes skewer Vanessa, two different-colored chips of amber. “This work,” she says, “taints all we touch. You know this, too.”

Thunder all but splits the sky. Vanessa stirs the sludge of stew and refuses to answer.

 

**IV.**

It isn’t their first argument, and it won’t be their last. The next morning Vanessa rises early, shuffling past the cold hearth and the cleared-off table, out the door and into a world washed clean. The sky stretched overhead is bleached the color of eggshells; the wind that rustles through the grass and stirs the tinkling chimes is gentler today, almost a breeze. She takes one of the baskets lying overturned by the doorpost. Come noon, she’ll bring it back full of nightshade or betony, something to smooth over the rest of their day. But for now she needs to be alone.

The ground is muck beneath her feet. Vanessa waits until she’s out of sight of the cottage to begin singing, the same cool, odd verses the Cut-Wife called a lullaby. “My breast is cold and as clay, my breath is earthly strong—”

She stops. Laughs. What a song to sing to a child; in the light of day she can’t imagine hearing it from her mother or her nurse. Or anyone else, for that matter. In fact, the only woman Vanessa can imagine singing it is the Cut-Wife, and even then only years ago.

 _Time of old._ It hisses through the grass, tickles her ears on a chilly wind. _We lay together, I and she._

For all she’s tried, Vanessa can’t picture the Cut-Wife when she was young. But she can picture two girls, their skirts rucked up over scabbed knees, their hair untamed, wind-tangled nests. Two girls, dark and fair. Giggling, losing themselves under an empty sky.

_I and she, I and she._

If only Vanessa could run again. Run, sprawl, open her legs to the moors and the sky without consequence.

_Foolish girl. There is always a consequence._

_I and she._

Vanessa sighs.

_Thee and me._

 

**V.**

The Cut-Wife isn’t welcome in the village. By extension, neither is she, but the same folk who suffer their women to make the trek to the witch’s cottage will suffer Vanessa in their shop, if only once every couple of weeks. This time she buys hairpins. The shopkeeper takes her coins without a word. By now they’ve made a routine of it—it can’t be his coldness that possesses Vanessa to take the long way back, cutting through farmers’ fields instead of through the woods.

It’s dangerous. Careless, foolish. Curious. A thrill of something she’d do better to tamp down quickens every step. She’s in plain view of the house, a tumbledown cottage no better than the Cut-Wife’s, when it becomes clear. She’s at the front gate before she can second-guess herself.

So. Something darker than plain curiosity, then. She waits.  

“Suppose I should be grateful you don’t sulk,” the Cut-Wife had said when Vanessa came back from the moor that day, the bottom of her skirt crusted inches deep with mud. “Wouldn’t suit you.”

“It wouldn’t,” she agreed, and handed the basket of herbs over without a smile or another word. Things have been quiet in the cottage since then. They have not been easy. All the freedom she felt on the moor vanishes under that roof, where she remembers the girl’s fear and the baby’s cries.

Vanessa waits. It’s too late to worry about how she must look—a pillar of black looming at the gatepost. Whatever called her here churns uneasy in the pit of her belly. _Eh, girl, turn back. You know well enough already._

The cottage door creaks open.

She watches the girl pick her way across the yard with the Cut-Wife’s green jar clenched in her hands. Trembling when she reaches Vanessa, eyes smeared with dark circles and lips chapped bloody, she holds it out, silent. Vanessa takes it.

“He’s gone.” The words stretch tight, set a snare between them. “Put that stuff on my tits. What she told me. Two days and he sickens, withers up.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Another day and he’s gone. You take that back,” the girl says, still trembling. Her arms are folded, her fists balled, her face hollowed out with rage and grief. It’s useless to apologize. Cruel, even. But Vanessa is not the Cut-Wife. She’s been raised too fine, too soft.

“I am sorry,” she says. Knowing it means nothing.

The girl snorts, or snarls. “You take it back,” she repeats. “Never come near me again, yeah?”

“Of course.”

“And—” her stutter returns. “—you tell that bitch she’s better off rotting in a grave. Better her than him. Tell her that.”

Vanessa steps back too late to avoid the clot of spit that splatters her cheek.

“Devil’s work.” The girl steps back herself, mouth wet, eyes dry. “All you do, up in that house—I won’t let it touch me again, you hear me? I won’t.”

The sky sags over them, iron-gray. A storm is coming, and the girl’s shout strikes Vanessa like the first blast of rain, icy-cold and furious. “Leave us alone! Both of you. Take your fucking witchwork and let us be!”

 

**VI.**

_Thee and me._

_I and she._

They flit at the corners of her eyes, through the wind, through the rain. Streaming hair, tattered skirts, ghostly-pale legs scissoring in the grass. Slick with rain, the jar almost slips from Vanessa’s hands—she can’t bring herself to let go of it, put it in the basket with the hairpins. All around her, the moor rolls and sways like the sea, and the girls… They are always here. They have always walked beside her.

_Time of old._

Water dribbles down her cheeks, soaks through her clothes and drenches her breast stone-cold.

_We lay together, I and she._

One story, ever repeating.

_I and she._

Neverending.

_On the moor, on the moor—_

 

**VII.**

“Take it off,” the Cut-Wife orders. It’s barely evening and she’s lit the candles and lamps, built up the fire to a blaze. Vanessa’s throat rasps on air clogged with smoke. Heat hardly penetrates her sodden layers; she fumbles at the buttons of her dress with fingers half-frozen, slick as icicles.

“You knew where I’d go,” she mumbles through chattering teeth. “The moment I stepped out the door. Didn’t you?”

The Cut-Wife ignores the question. “You wish that I’ll outlive you, then? You wish to freeze? Soft girl. Useless.” She smacks Vanessa’s fingers aside and undoes the buttons herself, then yanks at the dress until it slips down, a crumpled puddle on the floor. “Your underthings, too. Take that blanket, sit you by the fire.” She turns away as Vanessa obeys. Replaces the green-glazed jar on the shelf by the betony. “Always ones such as you. The ones who know too much and not enough.”

Tugging her dripping shift over her head, Vanessa shivers as musty warmth finally licks along her back. “The ones who do what?” Provoking, she knows. But perhaps she doesn’t mean it that way. Perhaps she only wants conversation.  

“Ones who seek out what they already know,” the Cut-Wife grunts, for once obliging. “No honor in torturing yourself. No wisdom in it, either.”

“I had to see.”

“So you did, eh? And what was it you must see so very badly? What, exactly?” Her back still turned, she aims each word expertly. “Tell me true, girl—was it my cruelty or yours?”

“Must you always do this?” Vanessa mutters, not expecting an answer. The blanket’s rough weave chafes her skin, envelopes her with the smells of dust and long-dried sweat. Old fabric, old skin. Old age. “I know that I’m cruel,” she says, louder. “I can hardly forget.”

It was a kind of cruelty that led her to that farmhouse, born of the same instinct that led her to fuck Mina’s fiance while her best friend slept only a floor above them—the pull towards darkness, the need to see everything that is ugly and writhing and broken, stripped bare, debased. Vanessa runs a hand through her hair, tugging hard at roots slicked back as if she’s swum in the sea. She goes to hang her still-dripping clothes by the fire, trying but unable to clear her mind.

Light follows, sooner or later. But truth be told, she’s never been as interested in light.

The Cut-Wife says, again without turning, “Mind you don’t hang them too close. Unless you want to singe those pretty drawers.”

She isn’t angry. At least not furious. If the Cut-Wife can feel out the shape of Vanessa’s thoughts, Vanessa has begun to feel the shape of hers; not half so well, but well enough. She knots her fingers in the folds of the blanket. “How can you bear it?”

It isn’t much different from what she did on the first day she met her, stumbling through the Cut-Wife’s memories, the grief and the searing pain. Softer, perhaps. Gentler. And what she feels this time is harsh, unapologetically coarse, no softness or sentiment in any corner of it. Yet very little darkness, either. The Cut-Wife snaps, “Work needs doing. That's the only how of it.”

Vanessa tastes blood and realizes she’s bitten her lip. “Then you’re right,” she says. “I am too soft. I can’t—” the Cut-Wife finally turns, eyes as sharp as ever, and she falters. “The girl thought the salve...she thought you’d killed her baby somehow. She didn’t say it in so many words, but I know she did. When it was so thin—holding it was like holding a bundle of sticks—” the old woman is coming towards her, and Vanessa refuses to back away, though her voice grows louder, wetter, angrier, more desperate. “If it had lived she’d find something else to blame you for—you’re always doing wrong, never right, I can’t—”

The Cut-Wife slaps her.

Vanessa reels back even before she feels the sting. The Cut-Wife’s struck her only once before, over the tarot cards. The old woman has to to reach up to do it, but that doesn’t weaken the blow. Anyway, it’s the shock of it that throbs worse than the blood rushing to her cheek. Shock has always been the point.

“If you cannot bear it,” the Cut-Wife says, “then best you walk out my door right now. Naked as you are, girl. Have I not told you this before?”

Vanessa glares.

“Have I not told you?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes glint with some sort of savage satisfaction. “Eh, but you will not. Too stubborn. Stubborn you’ve always been. Unyielding.”

The blanket’s slipped down her shoulders. Vanessa jerks it back up, her skin feeling scoured raw.

“When you were a babe in your cradle, when you were a slip of a girl running wild, when you watched your mother fuck other men and crept back the next night, and the next—more, you’ve always wanted more. Gorged yourself with it.” The Cut-Wife has to lift her chin to look Vanessa in the face; she doesn’t seem the smaller one now. She seems huge, monstrous, her unbending will forcing out everyone and everything else. The cottage is too small for her. The moor is too small.  “You are cruel,” she says. “Be crueler. Give them what they need though they hate you for it.”

The splatter of rain at the windows has faded to a patter. Thunders rumbles, a muffled sound, miles away. Vanessa feels her glare soften, feels the dampness still traced down her cheeks, pooled at the corners of her eyes. “The baby,” she says. “It was like holding a puff of goose down.”

When the Cut-Wife moves she tenses, half-expecting another slap. For all her ugliness, her cruelty, Vanessa is soft at the center. Always has been. And still she has no idea how to react when the woman cups a rough palm to her cheek. “Sit you by the fire,” the Cut-Wife repeats. “Before the cold goes to your head.”

Her touch isn’t gentle. It steadies Vanessa all the same. She clears her throat. “It’s almost time for supper.”

The hand drops. “Don’t need your help, girl. Sit.”

“Too much salt.”

“Too much of this, too much of that. Have your way and we’d eat clay, season it with dust. Sit you down,” the Cut-Wife growls in a tone that brooks no argument.

Vanessa hasn’t the energy left for another.  

 

**VIII.**

“She called me, I think. Not so loud as Mina, she didn’t realize she was doing it, but—” Vanessa stares into the heart of the fire, its snowy-white heat. “The pain, the grief—she needed someone to blame.” She looks up. “And so I came.”

“Learn, then.” The Cut-Wife reaches for her crock of salt. “Some calls are not to be answered.”

 

**IX.**

It bends over her, a face of many years past. Young, somehow, and haloed by wheat-colored hair. A large nose. A wide, almost cruel mouth. Eyes like mismatched chips of amber…

“Sister,” the girl says, and Vanessa wakes.

The rain’s stopped completely. Now the only sound that echoes through the dim house is the soft groaning of the beams, the pop and spit of the fire. She lies splayed across the couch for what seems like hours, the blanket tucked over her, unmoving. Vanessa blinks, her vision smeared by warmth and smoke. In that endless instant, in the quiet, the cottage feels terribly empty; she finally starts up on one elbow, her mind reaching out at the same time. Groggy, grasping—

“Lie back.” Close enough to touch. “Put your head down, sleep.”

If she rolls onto her back and tilts her head, Vanessa can just catch the Cut-Wife’s dark bulk, the wisps of summery-smelling smoke that wreathe her head as she puffs on her pipe. She’s dragged her chair from its usual place to sit beside the sofa, and here she sits. Without ceremony, without soft words.

Without moving.

 _No,_ Vanessa thinks, still groggy, her throat thick with the smoke. _Light—no, it doesn’t follow darkness. It must…_

_Take your fucking witchwork and let us be!_

_...must come in the midst of it._

She remembers the Cut-Wife holding the baby. The careful way she cradled it, even with her face set fierce and unyielding. Vanessa’s throat thickens even more; she closes her eyes, thoughts untethered, murky bursts. _You._ She must be imagining it, that for a moment the Cut-Wife stiffens. _You are my light in the darkness._

Perhaps she also imagines the fingers that come to rest on her head, stroke through her tangled hair. And the quiet rumble of a hum, a tune once sung to another girl. Long ago. _How oft on yonder grave, sweetheart, where we were wont to walk—_

Perhaps.

“What will I do with you girls?” The Cut-Wife whispers, her fingers deft and blunt, smoothing Vanessa’s unsettled thoughts, lulling her back into stillness, into warmth and peace. “What will I do with you girls?”

Night closes over them, and the wind breathes over the moor like a sigh.


End file.
